Dictators often use courts to legitimize repression, but doing so requires delegating authority to prosecutors and judges. While prior scholarship assumes that the courts are subservient to dictators, this paper examines how the career incentives of prosecutors and judges can lead to disagreement in the adjudication of political crimes. We argue that this disagreement is central to the legitimizing function of judicial repression. Using an original dataset on over 9,000 political trials during the Francisco Franco dictatorship in Spain (1964–1976), including fine-grained details on both pre- and post-trial outcomes, we find significant disagreement between what prosecutors demand and judges deliver in the adjudication of crimes against the state, resulting in relatively large acquittal rates. However, disagreement was not inherently problematic for the autocratic regime because it arguably helped legitimize repression by showing that the outcomes of political prosecutions were not always rigged. Our results suggest that judicial repression in autocratic regimes may not be straightforward process of delegation and execution; to the contrary, by examining interactions between prosecutorial and judicial agents, as well as a range of trial, pre-trial, and post-trial outcomes, we gain better understanding of how autocratic courts function, as well as the dynamics of principal-agent problems in dictatorship.

How does the repression of opposition leaders outside of parliament affect legislative behavior within it? Prior research has emphasized the effects of opposition repression on democratic mobilization, protest, and elections, but few works examine its consequences on legislative behavior, particularly in terms of speech-making and contentious debate. We explore these dynamics by focusing on the Edgar Lungu presidency in Zambia, a context wherein Lungu’s main presidential rival, Hakainde Hichilema, was infamously arrested and prosecuted on charges of sedition and treason. To understand the effects of opposition repression on democratic debate, we leverage a difference-in-differences design to compare parliamentary speech patterns of opposition and incumbent party legislators before and after the arrest of the opposition leader. Using a corpus of parliamentary speeches from the Zambian National Assembly comprising more than 350,000 speaking turns between 2011-2021, we find a marked deterioration in the quantity and quality of debate following the arrest. Our difference-in-differences analysis shows that the arrest resulted in a persistent reduction in the frequency and length of speeches made by opposition legislators as well as their discussion of substantive policy issues. We descriptively show that opposition legislators were more likely to be interrupted during their speaking turn and even denied requests to speak by the House Speaker, which we interpret as increased incivility towards opposition members following the arrest of their leader. Our findings demonstrate the pernicious dynamics of repression, including the indirect consequences of violence on opposition behavior, which has implications for freedom of speech and democratic representation in new democracies.

Pre-Analysis Plan. How do citizens perceive and respond to dual citizenship and diaspora policies, particularly pertaining to politicians who have ties to multiple countries? This project entails a multi-country survey and experimental design in Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia on public opinion about dual citizenship. Given the growing political and economic influence of the African diaspora, the rights and roles of dual citizens have become increasingly contentious. Using a descriptive survey, a framing experiment, and a conjoint experiment, we explore when and why citizens support dual citizenship, how they respond to diaspora politicians, and how they view the role dual citizens and the broader diaspora play in the economic and democratic development of their countries.

• Disseminated results to participants in French (Côte d’Ivoire) here.
• Disseminated results to participants in English (Liberia) here.

Backlash politics seek to revert to a prior social condition by invoking narratives that romanticize the past. But the effectiveness of these strategies remains difficult to theorize because the outcomes of backlash can be idiosyncratic and unpredictable. When and why does backlash produce lasting institutional change? To gain theoretical and empirical traction on these dynamics, I turn to postcolonial British Africa where independence regimes often justified the creation of authoritarian institutions under the pretext of restoring precolonial tradition and custom. Within this region, I select two representative cases, Zambia and Malawi, that encountered virtually identical backlash episodes simultaneously but experienced different institutional trajectories over the long-run. I argue that these divergences were rooted in constitutional design, specifically entrenchment clauses that raised the threshold for constitutional revision: whereas constitutional entrenchments in Zambia slowed the pace of authoritarian institutionalization, the lack of such entrenchments in Malawi accelerated it—ultimately enabling bold and lasting transformations of the postcolonial state. My findings provide insight into the conditions under which constitutions constrain authoritarian impulses and deepen understanding of interactions between backlash narratives and autocratic institutionalization.

How have ideas about imperialism been defined, defended, and disputed over time? Focusing on the case of French Asia, we trace the meaning of colonial empire during the turn of the 20th century through a textual analysis of two primary sources: the bulletin of the French Asia Committee and parliamentary transcripts of the Chamber of Deputies. Using an inductive approach, including natural language processing and qualitative reading, we find trends providing novel insight into how colonial ideas were presented to different audiences during critical moments of empire-building. First, moralizing terms commonly associated with French imperialism were rarely used by elites in conversations with each other; terms of economy, power, and international influence were instead predominant. Second, while geopolitical crises such as the First World War profoundly changed the calculus of colonization for the French government, pro-colonial groups failed to adapt their messaging, likely to the detriment of their cause.